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Google Penalize?

I read an statement somewhere which stated: "2 identical URLs linked to 2 different popular key phrases next to each other (on the same website/domain) will lead to a Google penalize. Google knows, that both terms are popular. This means, Google will ignore the links to your site (you'll not have any benefit) and the site you have your links on loses authority."

4 Responses

In most cases there's certainly less value for the second link (even more so to the target page since it's going to the exact same destination and the source page would have less link juice after the first link anyways). And yes, Google can measure several aspects of a keyword: popularity, commercial intent, search frequency, buzz/trend, etc. But I don't think one instance of this on a site would penalize an entire domain. A high instance of it would dilute a site in the hub/authority sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm as it's only pointing to one resource.

We ran a test linking a new domain (lets say it was asdfdfhfgj.com) and found out that the second anchor text to the same url bears a lot less weight than the first one.

We linked asdfdfhfgj.com from a respected domain/page. Two links, different anchor texts. Both anchor texts where random strings that previously returned no results on Google. For the first months the page only ranked for the first random string, not the second. This is obviously just one data point but it does suggest something about the way Google treats links to identical urls from a single page.

However, this effect is far from a penalty and I doubt Google would ever penalize for having two links to an identical url on one page.

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